CFI Calls for Senator to Withdraw Opposition
to Non-Controversial Aid to Voters

On Monday evening, for the third time in six months, a lone Republican
Senator objected to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein
(D-CA)'s motion to pass S. 223, the Senate electronic disclosure of
campaign finance reports bill. This bipartisan, non-controversial
legislation, co-sponsored by 41 Senators
(24 Democrats, 15 Republicans, and 2 Independents), would bring Senate
campaign finance under the same, voter-friendly electronic disclosure
standard that has applied to House and Presidential candidates, their
party committees and Political Action Committees since 2001, and
Section 527 Political Organizations since 2003. Without it, voters for
the Senate have been left in the dark about contributions to Senate
candidates and party committees, sometimes for months before elections
and key Senate votes. Click here to view CFI studies on this issue.

On two previous occasions, Sen. Feinstein's attempt to bring up the
bill had been stymied by a Republican "Senator Anonymous." But the new
Senate rule requiring identification of such objectors apparently led
to Sen. John Ensign (R-NV)'s surfacing and his public explanation of
his stance. Sen. Ensign is chairman of the National Republican
Senatorial Committee, the campaign committee for Senate Republicans.
Declaring that he has "no objection" to S. 223, Ensign nevertheless
opposed its passage unless it were coupled on the floor with a vote on
an unrelated amendment that requires nonprofit organizations to
disclose all of their $5,000+ donors when filing ethics complaints
against Senators.

Standing in the shadows behind Sen. Ensign was Senate
Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who had submitted the
Amendment, under his own name, to Sen. Feinstein the previous week.
McConnell had previously said that he would oppose Senate disclosure
without a vote on some unidentified Amendment from the Republican side,
and had reportedly stalled Senate Rules Committee consideration of the
bill for three years before Sen. Feinstein became Chairman.

This latest attempt to deny the public timely
information about who is supporting Senate candidates financially
should be strongly opposed by all those who care about a well-informed
electorate and a Congress accountable to the people. Whatever the
substantive merits or demerits of Sen. Ensign's amendment, it should be
quickly withdrawn and handled separately because:

Unlike the underlying bill, the
amendment would add major new disclosure requirements for nonprofit
organizations that – whatever their potential merits and faults –
deserve and require a full hearing and deliberation by the committees
that follow Senate ethics and nonprofit tax law before any floor vote.
In contrast, S.223 has had a full hearing and was reported unanimously
by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. It is sponsored by
a broadly bipartisan set of 41 Senators, with no declared opponents.
Moreover, S.223 would impose no new disclosure requirement on anyone.
All S.223 would do is require Senate candidates and party committees to
take information they already are required to collect and disclose, and
which they already keep for their own files in electronic format, and
send it on to the Secretary of the Senate as an electronic file.
Instead, Senate committee now print the same information out on paper
and the Federal Election Commission has to keypunch it all over again,
at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of wasted time.

The
proposed Ensign Amendment is non-germane. It has absolutely nothing to
do with timely public disclosure of campaign finance contributions.
Moreover, the impulses behind the two are completely different. While
the Ensign amendment aims, in the Senator’s own words, “to protect
individual Senators from purely politically motivated ethics
complaints,” the underlying bill aims to provide voters with relevant
information enabling them to hold Senate candidates accountable.

The
proposed Ensign Amendment is substantively controversial and therefore
likely to kill S. 223. A similar proposal has proved extremely divisive
in the House task force on ethics enforcement and has delayed its
recommendations. Given the expressed opposition of campaign reform
groups and the potential opposition of many influential nonprofit
groups to this unprecedented provision for disclosure of 501(c) groups’
donors, there appears to be no chance – whatever the arguments might be
on the merits -- that the House leadership would accept any such
amendment if it were attached to a campaign finance disclosure bill.
With so little time left in this Session and so many bills pending, the
Democratic Senate Leader, Harry Reid (R-NV) would also be reluctant to
bring up a bill unless he were certain that the "poison pill" amendment
would be defeated.

It would be rather unbecoming for
Senator Ensign, head of his party's Senate campaign committee, to
appear in the coming election year as the one who is obstructing
enactment of a bill for exactly the same public disclosure of Senate
campaign contributions and expenditures that his House counterparts
have been following for years. A better course would be for him to
follow the lead of Rules Committee Ranking Minority Member, Senator Bob
Bennett (R-UT), a co-sponsor of S.233 who agreed in Committee to
withdraw his own proposed amendment on lifting some limits on political
party spending in order not to interfere with passage of Senate
electronic disclosure. In return, the Committee recently held a hearing
on Sen. Bennett’s legislation in the Rules Committee. Senator Feinstein
has suggested to Sen. Ensign that his amendment would be considered in
the Rules Committee "in a prompt way." And, given the Finance
Committee's jurisdiction over and expertise on over tax-exempt
non-profit organizations, that committee might also wish to consider
the Ensign Amendment before it would be considered ripe for a final
vote on the Senate floor.

If Senator Ensign truly wants, as he claimed in
describing the purpose of his amendment, to "protect the institution"
[i.e. the Senate], he ought to want to protect its processes for
ensuring thorough consideration of legislation. He certainly should not
be obstructing a long-considered and long-delayed bill that would
strengthen the Senate's role as a democratically accountable
institution.